The novel opens on the last day of Colonel Richard Cantwell's life. He is duck hunting in Trieste, Italy, his thoughts presented in a protracted flashback, with Cantwell thinking about a young Venetian woman, Renata, and about his experiences during World War II. Not long before writing the novel during a trip to Italy, Hemingway met young Adriana Ivancich, with whom he became infatuated; he used her as the model for the female character in the novel. The novel's central theme is death, and, more importantly, how death is faced. One biographer and critic sees a parallel between Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The novel is built upon successive layers of symbolism, as in his other writing, Hemingway employs here his distinctive spare style (the iceberg theory), where the substance lies below the surface of the plot.

Hemingway himself said of Across the River and into the Trees, "Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers."[1]

He wrote it in Italy, Cuba and France, and it was the first of his novels to receive bad press and reviews. It was nonetheless a bestseller in America, spending 7 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller's list in 1950. It was, in fact, Hemingway's only novel to top the list.[2] Since its publication critics now believe it is an important addition to the Hemingway canon.

Contents

Across the River and Into the Trees begins in the first chapter with the frame story of 50-year-old Colonel Cantwell's duckhunting trip to Trieste set in time-present. In the second chapter, Hemingway moves Cantwell back in time with a stream of consciousness interior monologue, presenting an extended flashback and continues for 38 chapters. In the final six chapters Cantwell is presented again in the frame-story set in the time-present.

Cantwell, who is dying of heart disease, spends a Sunday afternoon in a duck blind in Trieste. In the flashback he thinks of his recent weekend in Venice with 18-year-old Renata, moving backward in time to ruminate about his experiences during the war. The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a series of fatal heart attacks as he leaves the duck blind.

Ernest Hemingway met his friend A. E. Hotchner in 1948 when Hotchner, recently released from the Air Force, took a job with Cosmopolitan Magazine as a "commissioned agent." Hemingway's name was on the list of authors Hotchner was to contact so he went to Cuba, asked for a meeting (Hemingway took him to a bar) and for a short article. Hemingway did not write an article, but he did submit his next novel Across the River and into the Trees to Hotchner which Cosmopolitan serialized in five installments.[3][4][5] The protagonist was based on Hemingway's friend Charles T. Lanham.

From 1949 to 1950 Hemingway worked on the book in four different places: he started writing during the winter of 1949 in Italy at Cortina D'Ampezzo; continued upon his return home to Cuba; finished the draft in Paris; and completed the revisions in Venice in the winter of 1950.[6]

In the fall of 1948 he arrived in Italy and visited Fossalta where in 1918 he had been wounded. A month later, while duck hunting with an Italian aristocrat he met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich.[7] He and his then wife Mary then went to Cortina to ski: she broke her ankle and, bored, Hemingway began the draft of the book.[8] Hemingway himself then became ill with an eye infection and was hospitalized. In the spring he went to Venice where he ate lunch with Adriana a few times. In May he returned to Cuba and carried out a protracted correspondence with her while working on the manuscript.[7] In the autumn he had returned to Europe and at the Ritz in Paris he finished the draft. Once done, he and Mary went again to Cortina to ski: for the second time she broke her ankle and he contracted an eye infection.[8] By February the first serialization was published in Cosmopolitan and in March the Hemingways returned to Paris and then home to Cuba where the final proofs were read before the September publication.[5]

Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950.[9] Adriana Ivancich designed the dustjacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department.[10] The novel was published by Scribner's on 7 September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000,[11] after a publicity campaign that hailed the novel as Hemingway's first book since the publication of his 1940 Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.[12]

Hemingway began as a writer of short stories, and as Baker explains, he learned how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[13] The style is known as the Iceberg Theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.[13] The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission." Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface.[14] Baker calls Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism.[15] According to Meyers an example of omission is that Renata, like other heroines in Hemingway's fiction, suffers a major "shock"—the murder of her father and the subsequent loss of her home—to which Hemingway alludes only briefly.[10] Hemingway's pared down narrative forces the reader to solve connections. As Stoltzfus remarks: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."[16]

Across the River and into the Trees is constructed so that time is seemingly compressed and differentiated between present and past – as one critic says, "memory and space-time coalesce." To move Cantwell into the extended flashback, Hemingway uses the word "boy" as a bridge between time-present and time-past. The dialogue stays in the present tense, despite the time shifts, and the word "now" is repeated to "reinforce the illusion", according to Stoltzfus.[16]

Cantwell, an aging military officer in love with the teenaged Renata, (whose name means "reborn"), is shown unlikeable as a character; one critic writes of him that his "lovemaking is described in terms of an infantry attack over difficult terrain".[17] He is dying of heart disease and his relationship with Renata can be interpreted as a means of seeking youth or immortality.[17] Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers believes Renata represents the city of Venice, she "connected" Cantwell (and Hemingway) to Italy, and in her characterization Hemingway romanticized what may have been a father-daughter relationship and he says Hemingway probably used Cantwell's fictional relationship with Renata as a substitute for his own relationship with Adriana, who looked almost identical to Renata's description.[7]

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker says Hemingway captured the theme of "the three ages of man," and in writing the book he finally objectified his own youthful traumatic war experiences.[9] Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented in a series of commonalities and differences. Death in Venice is set in the summer on Venice's Lido; Hemingway puts Cantwell in Venice in the winter. Mann's protagonist is a writer; Hemingway's a soldier. Both face death, and in the face of death seek solace in a much younger character.[18] Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (an 18 year-old countess with whom Cantwell spends the last days of his life) lives in the present. Cantwell says that "Every day is a new and fine illusion" where a kernel of truth can be found.[19] Cantwell is a character in opposition: a tough soldier yet a tender friend and lover. The two Cantwells at times overlap and bleed into one another.[19] Hemingway added yet another layer in the characterization: 50-year-old Cantwell in his dying day is "in an intense state of awareness" of his younger self of 1918 to the point that meld – yet retain the differences wrought by time.[20]

Charles Oliver writes the novel shows a central Hemingway theme of "maintaining control over one's life, even in the face of terrible odds." Cantwell knows he is dying and faces death "with the dignity which he believes he has maintained throughout his military service."[11] Oliver thinks the two male characters, Cantwell and Alvarito, have an unstated understanding – both men love Renata, but Cantwell accepts and is happy to know Renata will almost certainly marry Alvarito. Within hours of dying he says to himself: "You have said goodbye to your girl and she has said goodbye to you. That is certainly simple".[11] The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and his characters routinely achieve redemption at the moment of death, which can be seen as a form of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre believed to face death well is to live a heightened existence.[21]

Jackson Benson writes that how a writer transforms biographical events into art is more important than looking for connections between Hemingway's life and his fiction. He believes autobiographical events may have a "very tenuous relationship" to the fiction similar to a dream from which a drama emerges. Hemingway's later fiction, Benson writes "is like an adolescent day-dream in which he acts out infatuation and consummation, as in Across the River."[22] Meyers agrees that parallels exist between Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, but he sees more similarities with Hemingway's friend of many decades "Chink" Dorman-Smith, whose military career was undermined causing his demotion.[23] Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?"[22] For example he describes Hemingway's experiences in the World War II battle of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest succinctly as "Passchendaele with tree bursts."[24]

John O'Hara wrote in the New York Times; "The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across the River and Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616."[4] Tennessee Williams, in The New York Times, wrote: "I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway's new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy. It will probably be a popular book. The critics may treat it pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man's heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done." [25]

Williams and O'Hara were among very few of the positive contemporary reviews,[26] while negative reviews appeared in more than 150 publications.[16] Critics claimed the novel was too emotional, had inferior prose and a "static plot", and that Cantwell was an "avatar" for Hemingway's character Nick Adams.[26] The novel was also criticized for being an unsuitable autobiography, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.[27]

Sure they can say anything about nothing happening in Across the River, all that happens is the defense of the lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris ... plus a man who loves a girl and dies.

—Ernest Hemingway about critical reception toAcross the River and into the Trees.[28]

According to Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel.[29] Furthermore, Baker explains Hemingway was unaware that those close to him agreed with the majority of critics. For example, his wife Mary, who disapproved of Across the River and into the Trees, said: "I kept my mouth shut. Nobody had appointed me my husband's editor."[26]

Generally the novel is considered better than the critical reviews received upon publication.[30] Baker compares it to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, or The Tempest: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac" tone.[31] Meyers believes the novel shows a new "confessional mode" in Hemingway's work, and that it "would have been hailed as more impressive if it had been written by anyone but Hemingway."[26] Stoltzfus agrees, and he believes Hemingway's structure is more comprehensible for the modern reader—exposed to the Nouveau roman—than for those of the mid-20th century.[16]

^John Bear, The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992, pp. 47